From 140 to 280: Twitter makes changes

From 140 to 280, Twitter users can now share their thoughts with a little more flexibility and less re-arranging or deleting.

According to Reuters, Twitter “ran a test on 280 character tweets in September” proving that the extra 140 characters motivate users to finish their tweets and post them.

According to Twitter, this change will not apply to languages such as Korean, Chinese and Japanese because they do not experience the issue of running out of characters compared to other languages.

Recode reported that the company had thought about making tweets longer back in 2016 but decided not to do it because of the response from the public saying it might “ruin the brevity that makes Twitter Twitter.”

Aliza Rosen, the product manager at Twitter said to CBS News that the decision changed after listening to the user’s feedback, observing the problem and studying data to see how they could improve the social media platform and ultimately decided to start the research with real twitter accounts.

Rosen said to CNBC that ”only 5 percent of tweets sent were longer than 140 characters and only 2 percent were over 190 characters” saying that there should not be much change in a user’s timeline but still anticipate a spike of use in characters during the week of launch.

According to Twitter, people in the experiment expressed satisfaction as they were able to express more in their tweets and read more content.

Twitter has not stated an official launch date but will continue listening to their users to continue improving their satisfaction.